1 Boring Old Man

A trillion-dollar catastrophe. Yes, Iraq was a headline war
The Guardian
by Simon Jenkins
31 August 2010

^{Mission accomplished? The Iraq war did more than anything to alienate the Atlantic powers from the rest of the world today the Iraq war was declared over by Barack Obama. As his troops return home, Iraqis are marginally freer than in 2003, and considerably less secure. Two million remain abroad as refugees from seven years of anarchy, with another 2 million internally displaced. Ironically, almost all Iraqi Christians have had to flee. Under western rule, production of oil – Iraq’s staple product – is still below its pre-invasion level, and homes enjoy fewer hours of electricity. This is dreadful.}

^{Some 100,000 civilians are estimated to have lost their lives from occupation-related violence. The country has no stable government, minimal reconstruction, and daily deaths and kidnappings. Endemic corruption is fuelled by unaudited aid. Increasing Islamist rule leaves most women less, not more, liberated. All this is the result of a mind-boggling $751bn of US expenditure, surely the worst value for money in the history of modern diplomacy.}

^{Most failed "liberal" interventions since the second world war at least started with good intentions. Vietnam was to defend a non-communist nation against Chinese expansionism. Lebanon was to protect a pluralist country from a grasping neighbour. Somalia was to repair a failed state. In Iraq the casus belli was a lie, perpetrated by George Bush and his meek amanuensis, Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein was accused of association with 9/11, and of plotting further attacks with long-range weapons of "mass destruction". Since this was revealed as untrue, the fallback deployed by apologists for Bush and Blair is that Saddam was a bad man and so toppling him was good.}

^{The proper way to assess any war is not some crude "before and after" statistic, but to conjecture the consequence of it not taking place. Anti-Iraq hysteria began in 1998 with Bill Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing of Iraq’s military and civilian infrastructure, to punish Saddam for inhibiting UN weapons inspectors. To most of the world, it was to deflect attention from Clinton’s Lewinsky affair. Most independent analysis believed that Iraq had ceased any serious nuclear ambitions at the end of the first Iraq war in 1991, a view confirmed by investigators since 2003. Even so, Desert Fox was claimed to have "successfully degraded Iraq’s ability to manufacture and use weapons of mass destruction". Whether or not this was true, there was no evidence that such an ability had recovered by 2003. Among other things, the Iraq affair was an intelligence debacle.}

^{Meanwhile, the west’s sanctions made Iraq a siege economy, eradicating its middle class and elevating Saddam to sixth richest ruler in the world, though he faced regular plots against his person. Western hostility may have shored him up, but opposition would have eventually delivered a coup, from the army or Shia militants backed by Iran. Even had that not happened soon, Iraq was a nasty but stable secular state that no longer posed a serious threat even to its neighbours. It was contained by a no-fly zone that had rendered the oppressed Kurds de facto autonomy. It was not appreciably worse than Assad’s Ba’athist Syria, and its oil production and energy supplies were improving, not deteriorating as now…}

^{The overriding lesson of Iraq comes from that dejected goddess, humility. The dropping of thousands of bombs, the loss of 4,000 western troops and the spending of almost a trillion dollars still cannot overcome the AK-47, the roadside explosive device, the suicide bomber, and an aversion to occupation. Nations with different cultures cannot be ruled by seven years of soldiering. Bush and Blair thought otherwise. The Iraq war will be seen by history as a catastrophe that did more than anything else to alienate Atlantic powers from the rest of the world and disqualify them as global policemen. It was a wild overreaction by a paranoid, overmilitarised American state to a single spectacular, but inconsequential, act of terrorism on 9/11. As such it illustrated how little international relations have advanced since the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Its exponents are still blinded by incident… The west is leaving Iraq in a pool of blood, dust and dollars. It remains wedded to Iraq’s twin sister in folly, Afghanistan.}

Obama’s Mission Accomplished Ends War of Lies:
Bloomberg
By Margaret Carlson
Sep 1, 2010

^{We were warned there would be no ticker-tape parade, no soldiers kissing nurses in Times Square, no spoils of war. What we got was a president so somber and worn, it looked as if he needed a good rest, even though he just got back from one. No amount of rest could have made it more palatable to announce the end of what began as shock and awe, but then turned shockingly awful. More than 4,400 American lives lost in Iraq so far, more than $700 billion spent, and what do we have to show for it?}

^{Yes, Saddam Hussein and his murderous sons are gone, Iraqis have held up fingers stained purple to indicate they’ve voted, and there’s a hospital here, a school there. But we didn’t leave behind a functioning government. Barack Obama’s Oval Office address Tuesday evening prompted American television networks to air daylong retrospectives on the war. It remains painful to watch snippets of bravado from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as they insisted, contrary to reports from arms inspectors on the ground, that our choices were an invasion of Iraq or mushroom clouds caused by Iraq.}

^{One piece of video starred a leader with an icy soul. At a formal Washington dinner in March 2004 – by which time some 600 Americans had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom – a jocular, tuxedo-clad Bush narrated a slide show that must have had sides splitting during rehearsals at the White House. He cracked up his audience – including, shamefully enough, members of the television and radio news organizations that hosted the event – with pictures of himself searching the Oval Office for weapons of mass destruction. “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” he drolly remarked. “Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here?” That’s about as funny as remembering the credible reports that the Bush team was intent on invading Iraq even before the 9/11 attacks that made us all so fearful of terrorists getting their hands on biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.}

^{Republicans were up in arms that Obama kissed off Bush’s role with a brief, nothing-burger mention – “no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops or his love of country,” he said – and didn’t give him credit for the surge of American troops in 2007. But there would have been no surge had there been no decision to go to war in the first place. You don’t get credit for improvements made necessary by catastrophes you create…}

^{It took Obama to end Bush’s war. It’s difficult to imagine the conditions under which Bush would have called it a day. War blinds presidents. If you doubt that, go see the brilliant documentary, “The Tillman Story.” The film takes us back to the heady days for Bush when Pat Tillman, a talented and hard-charging National Football League defender, traded in his football uniform and enlisted in the U.S. Army after the 9/11 attacks. He became an Army Ranger and fought in Iraq, then in Afghanistan. It was in Afghanistan in April 2004 that Tillman was gunned down in a hail of bullets, by his own comrades, in a raid gone horribly wrong.}

^{That awful end didn’t fit the rosy propaganda the Bush administration was peddling, so from General Stanley McChrystal on down to the grunts who burned Tillman’s uniform and other evidence, a fantasy was crafted, one that didn’t include the grim reality of friendly fire. The administration blithely assumed Tillman’s family would meekly, perhaps gratefully, stand for a horrible series of official lies. They didn’t. Friendly fire is an inevitable problem in war. Lying about it isn’t. What the Tillman story tells us is that modern war is uglier still, the same old mistakes compounded by a big spin machine to cover up the messes, Ivy League posts for retired generals and no parades for the grunts.}

^{When you start a war with such a big lie, the others you’re tempted to tell seem smaller and get easier.}

I don’t know exactly what to say about the Iraq War myself anymore. Last week, we were in Upstate New York and visited West Point and the F.D.R. Presidential Museum. Surrounding the Academy Parade field were statues of Washington, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton. The FDR Museum had a reconstruction of FDR’s Map Room in the basement of the White House. I couldn’t feel the kind of patriotic emotions I usually feel at such sites. Those statues at West Point were there to hear Bush give a 2002 commencement address where he introduced his Bush Doctrine – preemptive, unilateral military action as the sole superpower actively promoting democracy in other countries.  My thoughts at those statues were discolored by intrusive thoughts of Bush clowning around or Rolling Stone’s version of General McChrystal. At West Point, there’s a memorial to the graduates who fought in the Civil War surrounded by cannons buried muzzle down. It felt sad – but not about the Civil War – about the Iraq War. Earlier, we’d visited John Brown’s farm in Lake Placid – the same sadness.

The first article says, "Most failed ‘liberal’ interventions since the second world war at least started with good intentions. Vietnam was to defend a non-communist nation against Chinese expansionism…" That’s an excellent point. As much as I opposed the Viet Nam War, I didn’t feel like this about it. Even though I personally opposed the Iraq War from the start, I still feel ashamed. It’s like we became another country, laughed off what was best about us. We were the bullies. We were the ones with the greed. We were the ones that made up lies to disguise our less than honorable motives. We treated the UN and the rest of the world with contempt and sarcasm.